cialis 20 mg tablets border=”0″ alt=”gMote” title=”http://ct.zdnet.com/clicks?t=72232350-fcda8243b2af06197976dd4e0ab0dea0-bf&brand=ZDNET&s=5″ hspace=”7″ vspace=”3″ width=”130″ height=”105″ align=”left” /> gMote allows you to record gestures (mouse motions) and assign them to frequently performed tasks. Use gestures to bring up programs, Web sites and more.
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OS: Windows 98/Me/NT/2000/XP/Vista
OpenOffice.org has shipped a new version of the open-source desktop productivity suite to patch a pair of highly-critical vulnerabilities that could expose users to arbitrary code execution attacks.
The flaws, which affect all versions prior to OpenOffice.org 2.4.2, could be exploited via manipulated WMF and EMF files in StarOffice or StarSuite documents.
The skinny:
OpenOffice.org described the bugs as file-handling heap overflows. cialis 20 mg dosage Patches are available in OpenOffice 2.4.2.
OpenOffice 3.0 is not affected by these vulnerabilities.
Isn’t the new Windows 7 user interface just a coat of paint slapped over the Vista UI?
Short answer: no. The build I have to work with is very Vista-like, missing the new Start menu, desktop, and taskbar enhancements. The demos I’ve seen here at PDC use more recent builds where those features are available. Those features will reach users in the form of a beta “early next year.”
In the past 48 hours, I’ve had a chance to get a closer look at those new UI features. One thing becomes obvious after only a few minutes of playing with the new interface: The Windows 7 design team has paid an enormous amount of attention to small details and have focused on workflows and end-to-end experiences, not just on dialog boxes and feature sets. The result feels comfortingly familiar cialis 20 mg cost to any Windows user, although the overall experience is often significantly different when you break down its small details.
One example that illustrates the point is the difference between Backup programs in Windows Vista and Windows 7. The Windows 7 version, shown below, includes a key feature missing from its Vista predecessor – the ability to include or exclude a folder from a backup set. But that’s not all: the entire workflow of the backup process has been streamlined dramatically. It takes 10-15 clicks to perform an image backup in Windows Vista; on a Windows 7 notebook I tested, the operating system offered to perform a backup when I plugged in an external hard drive. The entire process took three clicks and less than 10 minutes. The customization screen shown here added only two clicks to the entire process.
Is it faster? Really?
Measuring performance is tough enough with released code. For something billed as a “pre-beta” release and offered primarily for developers, it’s inappropriate and frankly foolish to even attempt granular measurements of speeds and startup times. My subjective impression is that this OS feels quick and impressively responsive, but I’m not prepared to break out the stopwatch until I have a more polished build.
In fact, when I sat down with Windows boss Steven Sinofsky for a one-on-one chat on Monday, he noted that much of the work Microsoft has done with Windows 7 involves interaction with hardware OEMs, helping them see how decisions they make – tuning the BIOS, choosing drivers, and pre-installing software – impact overall performance.
Sinofsky noted that the system I’m currently traveling with – a Sony Vaio TZ2000 with Windows Vista Business – will start up the PDC build of Windows 7 in 15 seconds. I’ll be installing the Windows 7 bits on this machine to see that level of performance for myself.
Isn’t this just a blatant ripoff of OS X/KDE/etc.?
Tracing the ancestry of UI innovations is tricky. There are, after all, only so many ways to interact with pixels on a screen to make things happen. And it’s foolish not to pay attention to what competitors past and present have done. As I pointed out in my first look, the new taskbar clearly borrows some concepts from the OS X dock, but it retains the Windows DNA and adds some smart behaviors that one-up Apple, most notably Jump Lists and live, clickable previews.
Ironically, the company with the most right to complain about UI ripoffs is Microsoft itself. In a presentation at PDC yesterday, Microsoft Senior Program Manager Chaitanya Sareen traced the lineage of those big taskbar buttons back to Windows 1.01, which was released in 1985. Desktop gadgets? Those were a key part of IE4’s Active Desktop in 1997.
What’s in it for corporate customers?
If you’re an IT pro who’s chosen to stick with XP and eschew Vista, many of the enterprise-focused benefits of Windows 7 are features you could have gotten with a Vista deployment, most notably improvements in group policy and image-based deployment. But there’s plenty of good stuff in Windows 7 as well, as my ZDNet colleague Mary Jo Foley outlined earlier today.
Microsoft hasn’t spent a lot of its Windows 7 demo time on corporate features. But the most noteworthy addition I’ve seen so far is native support for virtual hard drive (VHD) images. Using Windows 7, you’ll be able to mount a VHD as a local drive and, more importantly, boot from that virtual image. The most obvious application is rolling out a standard corporate image to remote workers, such as those in a call center, who don’t require local data storage and are capable of working in a strictly managed, locked-down configuration.
Is the Shut Down button fixed?
Yes. It’s not in the PDC builds, but the new Start menu that will be available in the beta release next year has replaced the confusing Vista power-button icon with an easy-to-customize alternative, shown here.
I know that you, dear readers, have questions of your own. Hit the Talkback button and ask away. I’ll answer the most interesting questions in my next installment.
There are many, many ways, however, to have your identity stolen, and though from hindsight this should have seemed an obvious possibility, it wasn’t something that I had taken sufficient care to avoid.
As the title of this post implies, someone managed to fraudulently withdraw $2500 from my bank account using an ATM card that was a clone of the one my wife and I have in our wallets (I’m not sure whose card was the original source of the information). This was discovered the night before my birthday, and though I am sure to get all the money back (banks do insure for these kinds of things), it did mean that I spent all day Friday running around faxing, mailing, and filing police reports, which cialis 2.5mg wasn’t exactly the way I intended to spend the day.
According to a detective at the West Hollywood Sherrif’s department, a group of individuals had apparently installed a device inside a gas station pump in the area. This device had access to all information entered through the payment point. This includes full details of information stored on the magnetic strip on the back of cards (why, oh why, aren’t smartcards as common here as they are in Europe), as well as anything entered via the keypad, such as a PIN number or a zip code. The device included a wireless transmitter that broadcast 300-400 feet, allowing someone seated in a car located nearby to capture all the information generated at the pump. At the end of a hard day’s work, the thief would use this information to print the data onto card “blanks.” Given that my information was for an ATM card, they used it to visit bank machines far from my area of town.
I was somewhat surprised, however, that my bank’s fraud detection routines did not flag these transactions. The individual (or individuals) who made the withdrawals took out nearly the maximum amount that was allowed in a give day, and did so repeatedly over the course of three days. Perhaps the first transaction would have been overlooked, but the second and third (followed by a fourth and a fifth a few days later)?
What brought the problem to my attention was the fact that my ATM card was not working, though oddly enough, not because of the fraudulent use of my account. Rather, the block was placed due to a “suspicious” transaction that sent some money overseas, and which was made by my wife. Foreign transactions, apparently, trigger a lockdown in ways that three straight days of withdrawals from my account (each of which was close to the daily limit) did not. I sure hope I never lose my ATM card in Las Vegas.
Anyway, I really should have been checking my bank account more frequently, and from now on, I’ll be a lot more careful about where I use an ATM or credit card. In fact, I used to be a lot more particular about that in the past. What changed, I think, was gas prices. Before, it never took more than $20 to fill my car. More recently, the cost was often more than I had in my wallet as cash.
I should, in other words, make it a point to have more cash on hand, though it does occur to me that that has its own security issues. People can spike ATM machines with card detection devices as well. ATM machines, however, tend to be a bit more secure because they contain large quantities of cash. Barring an epidemic of electronically-altered ATM machines, I’m unlikely to go truly old school and wait in line to withdrawal my money from a human teller.
It is odd, however, to think that modern technology is creating its own hindrance to a cashless society. I certainly carry less cash on hand these days than was the case before, as digital payment alternatives have spread their reach over the years. Such payment mechanisms’ popularity, however, rests squarely on our ability to trust in their security. Credit cards and bank ATMs may be willing to reimburse us for fraudulent charges in order to encourage us to use them, but it is still wise to reduce our dependence on them. Perhaps this will motivate more bulletproof security mechanisms, provided security problems prove a sufficient inconvience to trump the convenience of easy digital payments.
By the way, I’ll be at the Microsoft PDC in Los Angeles this week, thus continuing a trend wherein I opportunistically attend conferences as a member of the press when they come to my home town. I’ll be sure to write about anything I discover there (though keep an eye on Mary Jo Foley’s and Ed Bott’s blog, too, as they are both rumored to be in attendance).
Yesterday, I received the adapter cable I needed to hook this machine to an external monitor so that I could use it in a desktop configuration. (A note to the thrifty: Don’t pay Apple $29 for this mini-DVI cable. Instead, go to Monoprice.com and pick up the generic adapter for $9.96. With shipping, it was still under $12, and it works just fine.)
Now that I have this system up and running on a full-sized screen, I’m ready to make some head-to-head comparisons with Windows. Because this system has a mere 1GB of RAM, I was curious to get a sense of how thrifty OS X Leopard is when it comes to memory usage. I was especially curious to see how Leopard compares to Vista, which as been slammed by critics as a resource hog.
To get started I opened Safari and opened a single web page, then began playing an MP3 track in iTunes. With those tasks running, I checked the results from Activity Monitor:
As you can see, the OS reports that 581MB is in use, with 430MB free.
Next, I launched a similar set of tasks on a system running Windows Vista Ultimate. To make the comparison fair, I used the System Configuration utility to disable all but 1024MB of memory in the system, which has 4GB of RAM. This system is using the full Aero interface (disabling it had no significant impact on the RAM footprint). I opened Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer, began playing the same MP3 tune and browsed to the same page cialis 2.5 that was open on the Macbook. Here’s what Task Manager showed for memory usage:
For those keeping score, the Vista machine is using 594MB of RAM, which is roughly 2% more than its Mac counterpart running the same set of tasks.
Vista gets a bad rap for lots of things, including its reputedly voracious appetite for memory. As you can see, Vista compares favorably to OS X in this regard and doesn’t deserve that reputation.
